"Food for Thought" or "Question for Gamers Harder-core Than I"

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Reading an article about, more or less, the history of manga coming to the US, and they of course mention the flipping of pages, and how it is in Japan.

Then this thought occurs to me. When we play video games(let's take the first one I know of to feature scrolling, Super Mario Bros., as an example), we play them as we read a book: from left to right.

But with so many games originating in Japan, including the ones that began the side-scrolling genre, why don't games play as they normally read? From right to left?

LBD "Nytetrayn"

Comments

[rorita.livejournal.com]

Actually, the first game to feature full linear scrolling was Pac-Land, which started out going left to right; but once you reach your goal you have to backtrack right to left. (Plenty of other scrolling games existed before SMB, including Defender, Moon Patrol and Mappy.)

But as for the question...

If you ever play a Japanese video game, you'll notice the text reads left to right as well. Japanese read characters either from top to bottom, or from left to right. The right to left progression only applies for page sequence and moving from line to line (when reading top to bottom). So, actually... the left to right scrolling isn't so odd after all.

[shinkuu.livejournal.com]

Another Deep Thought to go along with the L and R buttons!

Maybe it has to do with computers. If you remember plotting graphs in algebra, in the first quadrant (where the X and Y numbers are all positive), things go from left to right and down to up. However, in computers, things still go left to right, but now go up to down (a source of confusion for some beginner programmers).

Maybe it would've been way too weird to have things go up to down, AND right to left. Then you'd be in... uh... quadrant 3?

I'm pretty sure that when they program in Japan, they need to get used to programming languages that originated in English. They must use keywords like IF, THEN, WHILE, END, etc... I suppose some languages would allow you to create aliases for these, but...

Anyway, bottom line is, maybe they do it that way 'cause of how the architecture already was?